Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes

The Seduction of the Uncomfortable

Minetta Lane Theatre, Audible Theater — March 29, 2026, 7:00 PM

There is a version of this evening that does not work. In that version, the audience sits in smug judgment, the play confirms what we already believe, and everyone goes home having learned nothing they did not already know. Hannah Moscovitch's Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, now back by popular demand at Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre, is emphatically not that version.

It is something considerably more unsettling, considerably more alive, and considerably more worth your time.

The setup is deceptively simple. Jon is an acclaimed novelist, a charismatic university professor, and a middle-aged man staring down the wreckage of his third marriage. Annie is nineteen years old, a star student, and a devoted fan of his work. What follows is exactly what the title tells you will follow. Moscovitch is not interested in the surprise of the affair. She is interested in the architecture of it, in how a man of Jon's particular intelligence and particular vanity constructs a story around his own worst behavior, and how thoroughly that story can seduce an audience even as it implicates one.

That is the play's great formal gamble, and it pays off. Jon narrates almost entirely in first person, addressing the audience directly, making us his co-conspirators with every wry aside and self-deprecating admission. It is less a play than a highbrow confessional, and Moscovitch's razor-sharp text gives Jon the writer's curse of being able to recognize his own clichés while being constitutionally unable to stop engaging in them. The hypocrisy is not incidental. It is the engine.

And then there is Hugh Jackman.

At 57, Jackman brings to this role something no purely theatrical performer could: the full weight of global celebrity turned inward and weaponized for the stage. His Jon is warm, funny, effortlessly magnetic, the kind of man whose charm functions as both gift and alibi. The house lights remain at a high dim through much of the 80-minute runtime, lending the whole thing the atmosphere of an intimate lecture, a confessional, a seduction. Jackman leans into it with evident relish, making occasional small ad-libs to the audience that blur the line between actor and character in ways that feel, at times, genuinely destabilizing. You catch yourself laughing at a man you ought not be laughing with. That is the point.

But let us talk about Ella Beatty.

You may buy a ticket for Jackman. You will be talking about Beatty for days. At 25 playing 19, she embodies a very specific and very difficult thing: the young woman just beginning to recognize the power in her sex, not yet certain how to use it, and smart enough to know she is being watched. Her Annie is not a victim and not a predator. She is someone in the process of becoming, and Beatty renders that process with a physical specificity that is genuinely remarkable. The hunched shoulders, the disarming directness of her speech, the awkward electricity of her presence opposite a man three decades her senior. She does not play vulnerability. She plays the performance of confidence over vulnerability, which is a much harder and more interesting thing.

About the age gap, which the audience around me made no effort to conceal their feelings about: yes, it is uncomfortable. Audibly so. When the two become intimate on stage, the discomfort in the house was nearly its own presence, a third performer working the room. People shifted. People gasped quietly at the crossing of certain lines. And Moscovitch earns every gasp, because she knows exactly what she is doing. She is not asking us to enjoy the discomfort. She is asking us to sit with the fact that we are not entirely sure where our discomfort comes from, or what it is actually about, or whether our certainty about the ethics of the situation is as clean as we would like it to be.

The New York Times called it "a terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play," and that is precisely right. It is 80 minutes without intermission and it does not waste a second. Director Ian Rickson keeps the production spare and muscular, the set little more than a few chairs and a desk that spend most of the play hugging the perimeter, as if intimidated by what is happening at center stage. The physical world of the play steps aside to let the performances breathe, and they breathe fully.

Is it a comfortable evening? No. Is it a tidy one? Absolutely not. The play confounds easy conclusions on all sides of what has become, in public discourse, an increasingly reductive argument. That refusal to resolve is not a weakness. It is the most intellectually honest thing a playwright can do with this material.

Go see it. Go see it with someone you trust, because you will want to argue afterward. That is exactly the intention.

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes is playing at Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre. Running time is approximately 80 minutes, no intermission.